There is no cosmic importance to your getting published, but there is in learning to be a giver.
We’re individuals in time and space who are often gravely lost, and then miraculously, in art, found.
So I sit for a moment and then say a small prayer – please help me get out of the way so I can write what wants to be written.
I remind myself of this when I cannot get any work done: to live as if I am dying, because the truth is we are all terminal on this bus. To live as if we are dying gives us a chance to experience some real presence.
You could see the amazing fortitude of people going through horror with grace, looking right into the pit and seeing that this is what you’ve got, this disease, or maybe even jealousy. So you do as well as you can with it. And this ravaged body or wounded psyche can and should be still be cared for as softly and tenderly as possible.
My three prayers are variations on Help, Thanks, Wow. That’s all I’ll ever need, besides the silence, the pain, and the pause sufficient for me to stop, close my eyes, and turn inward.
Gratitude is peace.
It may strike you as a small miracle that you have someone in your life, whose taste you admire, who will tell you the truth and help you stay on the straight and narrow, or find your way back to it if you are lost.
Most of us have done fairly well in our lives. We learned how to run on that one wheel, but now we want a refund.
Beauty is a miracle of things going together imperfectly.
All I ever wanted was to belong, to wear that hat of belonging.
We’re mimics, we’re parrots – we’re writers.
For somebody to be on a search means he or she is involved with these subversive topics, reading and comparing notes with allies, asking questions, daydreaming, brooding. Even though you have homework to do.
On writer’s block: The word block suggests that you are constipated or stuck, when the truth is that you’re empty.
Help, Thanks, Wow.
They are angry people. This is why they write.
Write about your childhoods, I tell them for the umpteenth time. Write about that time in your life when you were so intensely interested in the world, when your powers of observation were at their most acute, when you felt things so deeply. Exploring and understanding your childhood will give you the ability to empathize, and that understanding and empathy will teach you to write with intelligence and insight and compassion.
Becoming a writer is about becoming conscious. When you’re conscious and writing from a place of insight and simplicity and real caring about the truth, you have the ability to throw the lights on for your reader. He or she will recognize his or her life and truth in what you say, in the pictures you have painted, and this decreases the terrible sense of isolation that we have all had too much of.
For thirty years, she has answered all of my distressed or deeply annoyed phone calls by saying, “Hello, Dearest. I’m so glad it’s you!” I’ve come to believe that this is how God feels when I pray, even at my least attractive.
Toni Morrison said, “The function of freedom is to free someone else,” and if you are no longer wracked or in bondage to a person or a way of life, tell your story.